After searching the hard drives of two laptops, our main desktop and one external backup, I am finally convinced that I don’t have any other images of this painting’s progress. Strange that a computer crash could be a problem for an artist, whose job is just about as analog as it gets. At least I didn’t lose the reference material for a half completed painting. And of course, the painting itself did end up on the wall where it belongs, and where it will still hopefully be hanging long after hard drives have taken their place alongside the slide-rule, the telegraph and possibly the internal combustion engine as interesting but out-dated, obsolete technologies.
I also suspect that I have discussed the actual process of paint application often enough that for many of you, the compositional setup and the prep-work for this painting were possibly the most interesting part…other than images of the finished piece. Add to that the long delays in new posts while the Gallery re-located to Sonoma and while I was studying in New York, and the fact that I actually completed this painting nearly a year ago, and it makes almost too much sense to skip to the end, summing up the high points along the way. So I will.
The gentleman who commissioned this piece suggested the title “Breaking Through” which I had to agree, fit the theme perfectly as well as described the way the house and the cliffs interact with each other. So here it is, the finished painting, “Breaking Through”:
When last I posted an image, the cliffs had just been completed, and there was an odd sort of house-shaped gap of naked canvas almost randomly breaking them apart and giving them a distinctly un-finished feel. So it was not only a lot of fun to paint the house in a model-building, creative sort of way, but also very satisfying in a filling-in-the-missing-pieces, puzzle completing sort of way. But to be chronologically correct, I should mention that because I was painting with a deadline, and because titanium white is one of the slower drying pigments on my palette, I actually painted the Architect’s shirt next. But I digress…back to the house. The concrete sections were painted first, in part because they most directly interacted with the cliffs and in part because I am relatively comfortable painting concrete and it allowed me to begin filling in the space, establishing the shadow lines which help place the house within the cliffs, and it allowed me to work out a rough value structure for the other materials. As I worked on the concrete, I tried to keep in mind areas where the lighting would be affected by the surrounding structure. Many of those decisions are subtle, but you can easily see an example on the bottom surface of the third concrete balcony from the bottom on the right side. Not only is the glass reflecting light, but I imagined a partially covered pool in that area that would be reflecting ripples of light onto the ceiling above it. Again, it is always easier if there is an actual visual reference for situations like this, but it is also exciting to try and work through the intellectual puzzle of the play of the light in your head and on the canvas…especially if there is no exact visual reference available.
I painted the vertical flagstone walls next. Here it really helped to have the shadows on the concrete already painted, since there was more than enough to think about in creating a random pattern for the shape and color of the individual stones while also trying to keep them level with respect to the angles of the house and the linear perspective work I did in the scale drawings. The last time I spent this much time painting individual rocks was when I painted the railroad tracks in “Motive Force”.
There are only a few sections of roof that can be seen from this angle, but they were painted next. I was envisioning bronze with a dark patina to compliment the flagstone.
The last, and also the most enjoyable part of the house to be painted was the glass. This was also a study in modeling which consisted mostly of picturing what the sky and cliffs would look like if the viewer were to slowly rotate through a full 360 degrees, and then reflecting that view in the glass appropriately. In a few areas I also tried to show the transparency of the windows where light from the east would have been visible through the house and where the lighter area of the sky would be visible through the skylights.
Once I was happy with the house and the cliffs… with the background in general, I turned to the figure of the Architect and the foreground. As I mentioned, I skipped ahead and painted the shirt before I even started work on the house. This turned out to be a really good idea, since the lightest areas of the shirt, the areas containing the purest concentrations of Titanium White, were still quite wet when I got around to painting the rest of the figure. I painted the rocks on which the blueprints are draped first which, after the two-week long crash course in painting rocks that was the cliffs, proved to be fairly straight-forward. The pants hardly show, and represented a light 4 hour session to finish. The blueprints, on the other hand, were a little more of a challenge. The model, an architect himself, brought actual blueprints with him to the scrap shoot to use as a prop. So I had really great reference material to work from for the play of light on the paper and the general perspective of the lines of the house plans as they wrapped around and over the ripples of the pages. When I shot the scrap photos, I used a stool, a couple phonebooks and some other handy junk to try and approximate the shape of the rocks under the blueprints and on which the architect is leaning, so the wrinkles and curves in the paper were easy enough to paint. The tricky part was replacing the existing image on the plans in the photo with a plan view for the house in the painting. I ended up painting the paper first, waiting for it to dry, and then glazing the house plans over the top. It worked out really well.
As has been my most common practice, I saved the figure itself for last. Traditionally, this has served not only as a sort of reward to myself at the end of the painting (the figure is always my favorite part to paint) but also keeps me from accidentally smudging paint on the finished figure while painting the background. Recently, I have realized an additional benefit to completing the background first, and that is light and color control. Flesh tones are some of the most subtle color choices that can be made during the course of a painting, and, as with all color choices, can be heavily influenced by the surrounding colors on the canvas. Having a complete context of color in place while painting the figure makes the process of choosing flesh tones not only easier, but much more effective.
Most often, the face of a figure is where the most emotional content is vested. In this case, however, since the face is turned away from the viewer, the hands say a lot more than the facial expression. While the right hand of the figure is supporting weight, leaving the majority of the expressive aspect to the left, both hands add to the composition. The model had a lot of really nice musculature in his hands and fore-arms, one of the reasons I ended up using him. But I still ended up exaggerating the play of the veins and muscles to evoke a feel of capable, experienced hands…hands that could work with stone or guide the razor-sharp tip of a drafting pencil. The left hand is tracing the lines of the plan while the eyes, presumably, are tracing the lines of the house itself. I liked the idea even while working on the first sketches and instructing the model how to pose, but when I was working on the painting, I started to see an interesting similarity to the way a musician moves their hands over an instrument, which seemed even more appropriate to the composition. The figure in this painting is one of my personal favorites that I have painted.
So, there you have it. One of the more challenging compositions I have painted, one of the largest, one of the most time consuming, one of the most instructive and certainly the most complex commission painting I have undertaken so far. Once again, I apologize for the lost images and the slow updates. I would be more than happy to answer any questions, of hear any comments, and I’ll see you again soon in the Artist’s Studio. Thanks for reading.
